MoD top 100 suppliers: How you each gave BAE Systems £64 last year

One company received nearly £4bn from the Ministry of Defence in the last financial year, more than several departments' total budgets. See how the figures stack up

MoD top 100 suppliers: find out which defence companies did best out of the UK taxpayer. Photograph: Ray Troll

The Ministry of Defence spent £24.87bn with its suppliers in 2009-10 – and nearly £4bn went to 10 subsidiaries of BAE Systems, the UK's largest manufacturer, according to new data obtained by the Guardian. It's equivalent to £64 for every man, woman and child in the UK.

That means BAE received more than the entire budget of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (£2.24bn), the Department of Energy and Climate Change (£2.52bn) or the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (£3.02bn).

But Telereal Trillium would only be sixth on the MoD's list of suppliers, just behind HP Enterprise Services (previously known as EDS), which received £806m from the MoD for acting as its prime IT contractor. Its biggest task involves leading the Atlas consortium running the Defence Information Infrastructure, planned as a £7.1bn system to provide secure computing to 300,000 service personnel and MoD staff worldwide. That would work out at £23,700 per person, although the government has said it is trying to trim that cost: more on this at Kable.co.uk.

The biggest single MoD supplier was Nato's Eurofighter and Tornado agency, which received £1.77bn last year. The ministry has organised its data by subsidiary company or organisation: this can sometimes be revealing, showing that Devonport Royal Dockyard in Plymouth, the subsidiary of UK plc Babcock which maintains Britain's nuclear submarines, received £410m in 2009-10.

Babcock's subsidiaries in the MoD top 100 earned a total of £1.11bn, but the 10 subsidiaries of BAE Systems received £3.98bn from the MoD in 2009-10. This is equivalent to everyone resident in the UK being required to send the firm £64.41, and almost certainly makes it the largest commercial supplier to the government. (And its overall income from the government will be slightly higher, as there are other subsidiaries outside the top 100.)

Responding to the question as to whether it is dependent on BAE, the ministry said: "The MoD is committed to providing our armed forces with the equipment they need to carry out their jobs. Contracts are awarded, in accordance with EU regulations, to companies who offer the best value for money to meet our requirements and fulfil our sovereign capability needs."